a little red hen

"Mitt Romney Rap" by WWII vet, now 87

Have four minutes and two seconds to spare?  Even if rap is not your favorite popular music mode, try this one...

 

Every visit to Tenured Radical  (see blogroll at left), I need to get there  more often. Usually Claire Potter's writing and thinking educate me.  This time it was the unexpected headline above this video, "WWII Vet Stuart Hodes Headed to Top of Rap Charts at 87." 

Reminded of Hodes' rap (and how I'd thought about posting it) on reading Saturday's miscellany at TGB where Ronni Bennett asks for viewers' take on Randy Newman's new political song, "I'm Dreaming."  A longtime fan of Newman's earlier work, I was disappointed with his result though appreciated his message: there is rampant racism toward Obama by right wingers.

Back in 1977, we'd lived in Baltimore for a decade when Newman's song of the same name created some much controvery with its dark lyrics--

“ Beat-up little seagull
On a marble stair
Tryin' to find the ocean
Lookin' everywhere
Hard times in the city
In a hard town by the sea
Ain't nowhere to run to
There ain't nothin' here for free”

Speculating on why the song was written, Cenarth Fox and Shawna Hansen Ortega gather several theories from simply random to my own favorite, "Remember, this was ... 1977, when Baltimore, like much of the country, was suffering through a crippling economic recession."

Yes, those days seem similar to the present-- though more hopeful that things would improve.  And they did-- until unresolved issues of "rampant capitalism" (apt turn of phrase from yesterday's Up! with Chris Hayes) came charging back again.

I may relate more to Stuart Hodes' "Mitt Romney Rap," in this beleaugred moment, but I'm still waiting for another Randy Newman effort.  One with his own lyrics like "Baltimore" or the whimsical, "Short People" (1978).  He was on quite a creative roll in the 1970s (many of us now-old people were likewise).

And then there were his words and music for "Louisiana, 1927," composed in 1978, referencing his knowlege of  the state's abandonment in an early devastating flood. Few people knew this history until Katrina (personal link to New Orleans) happened.  Then we heard Newman's elegy over and over in the days after the flood.  As the New York Times' Geoffrey Himes, said, "...it has become the state’s unofficial anthem in the wake of the 2005 tragedy."     

"Jobs are not in my uterus!" Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC

Is there anything else for intelligent women to say right now? Splash it across a very bold, very red banner. Wear it across our chests like those suffragettes who captured the vote for women one hundred years ago in Oregon.

Aside: shout-out to Oregon's "Century of Action"  to spice up the local effort. Make getting the vote--8 years before the entire country--about something in the everyday lives of women today.  In 1912, imagine, it was possible for Oregon's governor West to go all out for women suffrage:

"Many men today are traveling through life on what their wives or stenographers know...many of us old ward heelers will have to take a back seat..."     

It was 2007 when I first met Melissa Harris-Lacewell (her name at the time).  Bill Moyers brought her into our living room on PBS.  She'd  just moved from the University of Chicago to become an Associate Professor at Princeton.  She talked at length about race in the interview, "Barack Obama is where we can project our attitudes about race...He is going to try not to have a conversation about race."  She did not see him getting the Democratic nomination in 2008--she hoped for vice-president!

It's five years later; Obama is president.  In our changed world, Melissa Harris-Perry, now married, lives in New Orleans as a Prof at Tulane University, and-- after many guest appearances with Rachel Maddow-- she has her own show.  Describing herself as "a black feminist scholar," she plunged into controversial issues this first day.  Her show expanded my understanding around current politics and introduced forefront other thoughtful, intelligent young people, some scholars. some not.

In the first session were Dorian Warren, Columbia University and Baratunde Thurston, The Onion, and author of the recently published book, How To Be Black.  Earlier a very stodgy Edward Cox (son-in-law to Nixon) sat beside Warren and was clearly floating about in a Goldwater type 20th century world.

Peter Edelman, Georgetown University Law School, older than Cox and not having to defend the Republican Party, pointed out that social issues have been brought into play by Santorum and his Gingrich from their fear that an improving economy takes steam out of their claims that Obama ruined it all.  The fallback becomes women's bodies rather than jobs.  Even though these are not in our uterus! 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 "All Republicans want to be our Daddies--particularly to girls," Melissa noted and delivered this lecture on "Compulsory Motherhood," in second hour of the show. Chloe Angyal, an Editor at the blog, Feministing, had joined her, wondered, "Who knows what comes next?"  Melissa, "I know--aspirin!"  Edelman said it was a losing strategy and Chloe responded, "If people are losing the conversation, they become loud."  Which is, of course, what is happening, much to the delight of the media who have kept it going far beyond its expiration date stamp.

I am with Melissa in feeling nervous about the potential power of this anti-woman position, about the success in various states with getting "personhood" into legislatures.  Chloe brought forward the imagery in my mind of The Handmaid's Tale:

"Forced birth is what we're talking about here in the personhood of the fetus.  Used to be a fringe position."

In the second hour of the show, gay marriage was brought in along with the right's focus on marriage at the moment when fewer women with children are electing to be married.  Joining the group were Jawn Murray who was new to me and Toure who is an MSNBC regular.  The link leads to a conversation on NPR that Toure had with Michele Norris last year about his book, "Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness: What It Means To Be Black Now."  He dismisses the notion of the U.S. as "post-racial."  Both of them spoke about Whitney Houston whose funeral was taking place in Newark, New Jersey, as the program was in session.

Trying to keep up with note-taking, I ran down in the last half hour. Missed the Sunday edition but it is all online so I can review, catch up, get ready for the exam.  I ready to learn more and hope America is too.

Feminism, as understood by men as well as women, brought all of the above to us:  thank you Rachel Maddow and our foremothers/fathers who worked so hard to get women suffrage.  

Beautiful Yetta, a Jewish Chicken to love...

The city where we live, Portland, a northwest bubble, in the larger bubble, Oregon, is sunny and crisp today.  Summer seems to have taken time off; we wear light jackets.  We're sorry to have left high heat to our New York family.  We have also moved into an ethnically-challenged environment where all the women are white and the men are not bad looking and white also--to badly paraphrase Garrison Keillor.

Why a bubble?  Another glorious Saturday Farmers Market can distract from events that seem far away.  Issues with much traction  here revolve around the land and the environment--important, but what about threats to democracy?  

Terrible trouble is being brewed on the other coast by uneducated people blindly following a crazy fool whose cause is stoked by a woman who perverts feminism with every breath she takes.  I choose not to speak their names on this site.  Two blogs I read regularly for their insights Darlene's Hodgepodge from Arizona and  Citizen K from the state of Washingon enlighten readers on the dangers seeping from this execrable duo.  I thank them for doing the work. 

To celebrate the possibilities of diversity which might expand my own new city's bubble, I offer a children's book I'm about to mail to granddaughter Roxie in New York.  Each of my grandkids has been indoctrinated into my love of hens.  When they are older, I'll try to explain the reason behind this obsession.  I believe my maternal great grandmother in Poland must have raised chickens; this is an invention since no one was kind enough to share any of my ancestor story.

Ron, however, brings chickens closer to me via his paternal grandfather, the one who was brought to America from Bialystok, Poland by his sons who'd come before World War One.  The Blooms love to tell how this ultraorthodox Jewish gentleman, a ritual slaughterer (mostly chickens I assume) and scholar, arrived on the boat at Ellis Island with an explanation.  Wind had blown his professional certificate out of his hands and into the sea.  Now he could devote himself to religious study and be supported by his three American sons.

[Aside:  My sister-in-law, M.M., who reads my blog, is older than spouse Ron, will--I hope-- correct inaccuracies  in this story.]

Yetta, Jewish Chicken, entered my life through NPR.  Scott Simon of Weekend Edition Saturday has a long-running friendship with the writer, Daniel Pinkwater.  They entertain themselves and listeners by reading children's books together laughing as they go.   With four grandchildren (and on my own for suggestions),  I decided it was time to track down Pinkwater's books of which there are many.  Yetta is the most recent, a treasure even if you are not a chicken aficionado--lovable illustrations by Jill Pinkwater.  The text mostly in kids' book English plus much Yiddish, and a little Spanish too! 

Beautiful Yetta The Yiddish Chicken seems a timely addition to Roxie's (laundry helper on her June visit) poultry collection in New York; her family is about to move from the only home she has known for her first four years.  Tucked into its quirky, child oriented text about a lost chicken who lands in an unknown place is a message.  The book's flap, explains:

"Moving from city to country...appearing different from others, or adjusting to change...Jewish tradition teaches how we are to treat newcomers....From the Torah, 'The strangers who sojourn with you shall be to you as the natives among you and you shall love them as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.' "

Yetta, Roxie, and I want you to join us in hope that rises above and beyond what happens today.  I close my eyes and remember a conference in 1964.  Martin Luther King speaks of his dream to New York City teachers.  We rise to our feet; we are true believers.

"ella," lower case contraceptive pill, tip toes here

How far did I have to go to find this picture?  To the UK where ella, the new "You have five days to take care of your unprotected sex encounter" pill    is now available.  Approved this week by the FDA as available by prescription in the U.S., none of the stories about it showed what its packaging looked like.

Call me paranoid, but this seems just another symptom of how frightened officials here are about making this breakthrough contraceptive pill available.  If you don't see it, will it go away?  Please.

In a braver time for women who demanded control over our own bodies, there's  this heartbreaking pin in my jewelry box.  Every now and then it appears on my shirt.  Probably has no meaning for women with no memory of time before Roe v. Wade.   Each time I look at it, I feel the sadness of my own experience and exasperation about the unwon battle for reproductive justice.  A recent find of a hangar slipcover left from our son's wedding in New Orleans (the year before Katrina) moved me to think about writing a post, "Meditation on a Hangar." But celebrating ella is more upbeat and hopeful for the future of my grandchildren.

My English friend Gillian who lived downstairs in my 4th apartment in Manhattan in two-year span and the one I returned to after my own illegal 1957 abortion, would  entertain as she described the dime store wedding band almost slipping off her ring finger during her visit to the NYC Planned Parenthood (link not historical indicates the ongoing struggle).  Why were we laughing?  We had cried so many times.

That was New York City in the 1950s when the only way a woman could get a diaphragm was visit to a gynecologist for a prescription.  Expensive.  The cheaper alternative was PP.  Gillian developed a complicated story for the doctor there.  At the time, the gyn would ask the patient supplicant to see if she could use the device properly.  And so the ring began to slip.  Her story became more hilarious when she returned to PP for a new diaphragm the following year and saw the same woman doctor who remembered her.  Gillian was seriously challenged to update her marital story.

All this to say, I wish the organizations that support CHOICE would spend some of our support bucks on powerful imagery.  Then get a couple of those "girls" on the TV show "Mad Men" to appear in national advertising with one on their breasts. From what I can see here of the ella pill, that would be a fine design, surrounded by the message, "Five days to Choice."  Sure, you can think up a better one but will the orgs listen to old ladies?

UPDATE:  The one place that gets my money in this never-ending struggle is the Center for Reproductive Rights.  Check their site for all their important legal work that could use your support .

Grand Isle, Louisiana, now, May 2010, USA

First image I saw this morning. In an email from FDL, the blog Firedoglake.

Asked me to tell the Senate to "Hold BP Accountable" and sign their petition.  I did that.

Does not provide relief:  corporations have bargained away our grandchildrens futures.

Photo:  John McCusker, Times Picayune, New Orleans.

Ron Bloom Celebrates Another Birthday!

All my love and thanks for all the places we've been, crises we've survived,  children and grandchildren we've loved...

...and your great patience in teaching me too many things to list...what I've learned from your pleasure in sharing with everyone who comes within your range.

  All of us look forward to many more June tenths with you--

most especially yours truly ...

Celebration: High-Rise Style...Last night--a building party where we live. Lee Morgan, Ron's co-chair and great party-giver, suggested this one as they wrapped up their term of office, turned it over to another pair. Singing the Birthday song was a high point of the pot-luck evening...who says New Yorkers don't care about one another?

Invitation forwarded from NYC...which button wiil I wear?

Like everyone else, my expectations are high for President Barack Obama.  Far from the East Coast where I'm usually  closer to Federal action, I feel a bit disoriented.  My Elderblogging friend, Betty Reid Soskin, has flown from California with her special invitation for January 20, 2009.

As I watch from Oregon, I'll think of her, an 83 year old African American (still working as a Park Ranger) who has known discrimination on both coasts and perservered through many life changes.  Her next post at CB Breaux Speaks will be wonderful to read.   My own hopes are expressed in the many categories  listed at the end of this post.

 Sunday's Oregonian featured a long article  on Portland as the whitest city in the United States.  It's a long and sorry story that goes back to its beginnings in the middle of the 19th century.  Young Oregonians and new residents are asking more questions--a hopeful sign.

Good News + Miscellany

How about starting to knit again, Saz, my friend in blogland? Maybe a scarf for people in Mongolia where winter is very intense. Lots of people did it-- coast to coast, Canada, Australia. The Dulaan Project collected 12,085 handknits-- at least one item of clothing or a blanket went to more than 12,000 men, women, and children.  A year's worth of knitting by many little red hens and a few roosters.  Time to begin the 2007 accumulation.

More at Mossy Cottage Knits, Ryan's blog from Seattle.  There's even a tiny photo of little Mongolian children as they wear the latest shipment.  I could swear the brown and orange hat is the one Ron knit.   Of course, it could be someone else's very original color combo. 

                                                *  *  *  *

Emaile from my friend, Steve Hill, "... recently found good news about New Orleans:  http://www.justiceclothing.com/thereis/justice/kgordon where
I ordered some shirts made in a unionized factory
that reopened there!  (It's difficult to find ethical
clothing that appears conventional enough for the
office, so this site is handy.)"
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Car radio, somewhere in Massachusetts, "Rent a husband!  For everything from                                               baby to faucets to...."                                                      

Bingham, Maine, Main Street

                  

                        

Updated political banner, Radical Vegan Food, Durham, N.H.

What's the Distance between New Orleans and San Leandro?

                   This morning's Comment from Joared, lively responder in Elderblogland.

"is anyone writing about New Orleans? .... it would be quite challenging to capture everything that needs to be said. Wonder if August Wilson, whose plays are so well written, would have undertaken such a script?"

Tapped into my guilty feelings: need to post something besides this one.  Could I lay off some guilt on viewers; only response to it came from knitting friend Njoyia of the Harlem Knitting Circle.  Do only black Americans continue to feel the pain?  Do those who are not black really understand the pain of racism?

Not according to Brian Copeland, whose powerful one-man show, Not a Genuine Black Man, we saw last night.  He brings humor to his terrible, personal story.  Not what we've seen in Richard Pryor:  this is more about us, the white Americans who think we get it but never can.  Because there are not enough of us trying to make a difference.  Sorry, readers, but it is Sunday and you have happened upon my soapbox, a little red hen. 

Let me make it more personal.  It is 1969.  Ron and I have already lived with, as Jews, housing discrimination as others in two places outside New York City-- Oberlin, Ohio and Baltimore. We'd observed the "illness" of racism and its impact on African-Americans and on us.  My hair is very long, Ron has almost as much on top and a bushy beard.  We sit at the after-dinner table in suburban St. Louis with my father and his wife, longtime civil rights activists around school integration.  I asked, "Wouldn't it have been a better strategy to go for housing integration right after WWII...when everyone was feeling positive about "the other"?  They were incensed; I was their hippish, smartass child who thought open classrooms would be a good idea for my child. 

Look at Brian Copeland's website.  Look at the video clip from his hometown, San Leandro, California, a 1971 CBS-TV special.  This was not the South.  How he survived is a very powerful story.  But at what cost to him--and to us?  If you're in New York, the show is on till July 16.  Or, you can buy his just-released book, "Not a Genuine Black Man."

By the way, Eleanor Roosevelt also believed that housing integration was the place to begin.  I'm honored to be in her company.  New Orleans?  Send a check to Common Ground or one of the black colleges, Xavier University of Louisianna. 

 

NEW ORLEANS: 2002 Memories and Now

Because my son and daughter-in-law, Nick and Leanne, were living in New Orleans in 2002, I decided to take This Dirt Museum on the road. With their help, I connected to delightful people, hospitality, and an introduction to the city's delightful  enthusiasm for the unexpected.

Ever since beginning this blog, I've wanted to express my concern about the present and future of New Orleans and the Guf Coast.  Up to now  the website link to Common Ground Collective has been a stand-in for my wish to DO SOMETHING useful.  That's a feeling shared by all Americans of good will.  We wish for a more personal connection--after we've sent money for relief efforts, books to the New Orleans library.

Is this urge too self-serving?  It certainly is the right instinct when we see that our government's response is no-response.  So much could have been different if the feds had created massive programs along the lines of the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps to clean up and re-build.  Though this elderblogger is not able to join the thousands of college students and medical professionals running a clinic who have volunteered at the Common Ground site, I hope that writing about the area reminds you to do what you can.  Send money, if possible, encourage young people to participate in hands-on relief efforts.

In my "Favorites" file, I keep the link to The Times Picayune, New Orleans' daily paper.  The image at the top of this page is the best piece ever written about my life with worms. It appeared April 12, 2002, as an alert about my many performances at Kingsley House, Crescent City Farmers Market, Tulane University, and the Botanical Garden.  (I was younger then.)  Arranging red wigglers to spell "Compost" was inspired. A readable copy is on the wall of my current installation at Knitty City.

Sadly, the Times Pic, as its known, carries bad news this week.   FEMA is closing the facility that housed up to 40,000 volunteers who have been giving their time and energy to re-building efforts.  What can we do?  Write our congressmen/women, lobby those running for national office.

Wanting to end this post with some upbeat nostalgia, I offer a view of one of the objects New Orleanians particularly enjoyed.  Before I plunged into kitchen composting, my art form was neckpieces crafted from weathered shells, beads, hardware.  Once I discovered that wet compost could be handled like clay, would dry very hard, I had an exotic new medium--vermicompost, a/k/a, transformed garbage, to use as beads. 

Compost Necklace.  Components, starting from bottom:  Manhattan compost (center square bead, note white eggshell), carved bone beads,  flattened bottle caps, Mexican compost (round and small square beads), Italian glass beads, Jute cord, copper clasp.                                                                              

"It is just not natural to speak of New Orleans in the past tense. There is an element about it that is timeless, that is always the present. The past in New Orleans cohabits with the present to an extent not even approximated in any other North American city." -- Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters, 2005